This problem seems to be a little bit involved, so please read everything..

I got Grandia 2 for the PC. I installed it, and fired it up. There was no company movies, or anything like that before the title screen. I didn't think anything of this at the time.

At the title screen, I selected NEW GAME, and am taken to a "Now Loading" screen, and then blackness.. I knew there was an intro movie, so maybe it was getting ready to play (having to be accessed off the CD). Well, 30 seconds later, no movie, no nothing.. Just blackness.

I exited the game and reseted the video settings of the game to default and tried again. Same thing.

I proceeded to uninstall the game and reinstall it. Still, same problem..

At this time, I tried playing some of the movies of the game outside in Windows Media Player. All movies were in AVI format. I found the company intro movies in the game folder. Remember, I didn't get any company movies when starting the game.

At first, they did not play in Windows Media Player, but WMP looked online for a CODEC to decode the movie.. It found the proper one, and thus, the movies worked in WMP.

I tried the game again, and low and behold, I got company movies INSIDE the game to display.. I figured problem solved. But no... The intro movie of the game STILL did not display.

Next, I tried running some of the movies on the Grandia Play Disc (Disc 2), including the intro. None of them worked in WMP. I figured they would not (gathing that this game needs to use WMP to play the movies), and was hopeful that WMP would find a proper codec. Unfortunately, it did not...

Well, I tried the game again, this time letting Grandia 2 sit while the intro movie was supposed to be playing. And about 2 minutes later, I was presented with the actual game, thus further proving that there was a problem with playing the movies of the game, namely, the "CG" movies (they have titles like mCG***.avi).

Now, I am stuck with a mostly bits and pieces game. There is about 24 movies in the VISUAL folder on the CD that won't play, and I know it has to be tied to WMP not being able to play the movies.

What I have found through testing is that the "CG" movies WORK in QuickTime, but I do not know if I can make QuickTime be used by the game to play the movies (if the problem is with the game trying to use WMP to play the games, which WMP doesn't have the right codec to decode the games).

The whole problem stemed from me doing a custom install of Win98SE where I DID NOT choose to install Video Compression (figured it worthless). Windows Video 1.1 is included with Video Compression, and inside Windows Video 1.1 is Indeo 3.2, which is used on those Grandia 2 movies that would not play.

I got around it by downloading an Indeo video pack. I could have gotten around it by installing Video Compression from Windows Setup (from add/remove programs).